.

I want Five to cry.

Now, I love the near-emotionless, badass, merciless man-child Five as much as next person, but he’s been through so much and I just want to see him cry.

Like, the world is going to end again, he’s with his siblings, nothing is working out and it seems like they’re all going to die and he’s shouting in frustration and he just reaches a certain point and breaks.

He feels the tears well up in his eyes and although he usually immediately wipes tears away to avoid any emotion slipping out him, he’s too tired to care, so the tears fall as his chin wobbles and he trembles and he doesn’t even resist when everyone crowds around him and just holds him. (Alternatively, Five wipes the tears away and huffs a little, blinking rapidly. He paces for a few steps trying to get a hold of himself but he just grows more frustrated and hysteric so he starts kicking things and swallowing his sobs before Allison or one of the others just comes up and pulls him into a hug, refusing to let go even when he struggles, and he just crumbles while the others crowd around and hold him, y’know, if you want extra angst and trauma)

And though nothing really changes after that, Five is different. He’s not nicer or sweeter or calmer or anything, but there’s a difference in him that’s barely noticeable, just enough for there to be an unspoken agreement amongst all of them: they would make it.

And they do. And when the world is saved and everyone’s okay and they can breathe again, Five cries again. But it’s okay.

They’re gonna rip up your heads, Your aspirations to shreds Another cog in the murder machine

He’s time-travelling (across decades with multiple people who cannot be easy on the body). He’s fighting every other person and getting his ass handed to him (and the accruing injuries and exhaustion probably explain why he got beaten so often this season when he’s supposed to be a top assassin). He’s fresh from season 1 and all the shit he went through then. 

But here’s the thing…. 

He looks like he’s having fun. 

When he killed the commission soldiers in the diner in season 1, he looked like he was having fun. When he killed the Board this season, he looked like he was having fun. 

When he was just an assassin, he had to separate those two parts of himself. The assassin was a tool to get home and everything that he did in that persona was excusable. It wasn’t who he is. He could go out and kill and be good at it and have fun, but the real him was someone else. The real him wasn’t a killer and didn’t enjoy being a killer. And that distinction held up just fine when he was the only person he had to convince. 

But now he’s home. He’s with his family, and he’s still killing people. He’s still having fun with it too, and I think it’s finally starting to hit him that this is a part of who he is as well. The scene with the Handler this season was so much like the one from season 1, except that Five seems more desperate now. He’s trying to make the Handler believe that old view of himself. He’s trying to make himself believe it because he really truly does not believe it anymore. 

The other scene that stood out to me with Five was psyching himself up for killing the Board. He freaks the fuck out when his fudge nutter gets stuck in the vending machine. That reaction is way beyond normal, even for Five. There’s clearly something wrong there. Then he leaves the vending machine, takes a deep breath, smiles, takes a swipe out of that cake frosting, and he’s ready to go. 

(Interesting side note here: Hazel and Cha Cha are seen constantly eating donuts and candy bars in the show. In the comics, they also have a HUGE sweet tooth. I don’t know if that has anything to do with the frosting and fudge nutter bits, but it would be interesting if that’s part of how The Commission train/condition their assassins…)

But he doesn’t want to do that. He doesn’t want to be that person. He wants to leave that behind, but he can’t. He can’t just carve out that part of his personality, that part of himself, and he can’t carve out that part of his past. 

When Lila finally confronts him about killing her parents, Five tells her, “It wasn’t personal,” as if that would be any comfort to her. It doesn’t matter if it was personal for Five. It was personal for Lila. He killed her parents. That’s not something he gets to claim no responsibility for just because someone else told him to do it. And yet, I wouldn’t expect Five to say anything else when being confronted with that, because this is the same attitude he has had for the last two seasons. 

The fact that Lila is on the loose with her own briefcase is proof to me that we have not seen the end of this conflict between the two of them. Lila didn’t join Diego, who she clearly loves. She didn’t join a family that was going to support her in a way that she had never been supported before. This is a family that welcomes home people who have made huge mistakes, people who have locked them up or tried to kill them, people who have ended the entire world even. She has to know they would have been there for her, and yet… she leaves. Because Five still killed her parents. She can’t be part of this team, and I’m not convinced that she’s through with Five. 

If Lila comes back, Five will be forced to confront his past in a way he never has had to do before.